The Harvard-MBA-toting, former Yahoo! product designer relied on these free-flowing gab sessions and other forms of inexpensive fact-finding like trade shows, customer surveys and industry reports to come up with the idea for a new candy called nibs: pebble-sized cacao beans smothered in premium chocolate.
These farms produce more than half the world's cacao that's processed into candy, cookies or cocoa butter used for cosmetics.
Only 72% cacao beans are used, giving these candies an exceptional flavor.
"Cacao was never meant to be a candy bar loaded with rubbish - it is a powerful, healing, alchemical ingredient," says Richard Turner, founder of the Raw Chocolate Shop.
To help cacao survive, the genomics institute is working with food and candy company Mars, as part of the candy company's $1 billion commitment to reducing its carbon footprint.
Now, a rival group of scientists, financed in part by the candy maker Hershey, has published its genetic sequence of the cacao tree in the journal Nature Genetics.
For Quichua people like the Dahuas, cacao has always been a treat — the pulp a tart candy and the purple bean, when ground to a paste and mixed with hot water and a little sugar, a rustic hot chocolate.
The cacao fruit, the cacao bean are at the center of the candy industry.
It's like no other candy out there -- there's no nougat, no peanuts, no 80percentt organic cacao.
Still, scientists in both groups say that cocoa farmers, candy companies and chocolate lovers will benefit from having two sequences, of different varieties of cacao, that can be compared.
